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| Are you out of your mind, or just more brain damaged than me? by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 12/04/2015, 3:26pm PST | ||||
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Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: This was one of the things I had to go and look up on Wikipedia to understand if I thought the term was what I thought it meant. And even Wikipedia admits that Chess is only partially solved and may never be. But I'm going to argue it isn't solved and never was, because unless someone is using a computer to make all their moves - an idea that goes back at least to a 1967 episode of Mission Impossible - an ordinary player such as you, me, Pinback or anyone else here or on Jolt Country, is not going to play perfectly. Errors can occur. And that's the big argument against claiming the concept of chess as a solved problem: to claim it is solved requires that all players involved play perfectly. You can make that argument for Tic-Tac-Toe and maybe for checkers, but chess is too complicated for most unaided humans to play at perfection, at least a large part of the time or all the time. I'm somewhat familiar with chess, both because I've done the two spoken versions of the article on Wikipedia; it takes about an hour to read it, and because I've done some playing going back perhaps 40-45 years, as this quote from the preface of my book In the Matter of: Instrument of God tells about a chess game I played once. When I first learned to play chess back in 5th or 6th grade in school, I was about 11 or 12 at the time, I was terrible at it and a friend of mine kept crucifying me, I kept losing badly. I got so mad one day I swept all the pieces off the board. Well, one day - and he swears he was playing his best and did not throw the game - my friend made some really bad mistake in one of his moves. You can bet I enjoyed every minute of that game as I turned around and destroyed him! No mercy and not a bit of charity, I enjoyed watching him suffer and lose big time. You have to figure it was a significant moment of my life when I can remember one chess game I played over thirty years ago, and yet sometimes I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. Do I regret destroying him in that game? Of course not, it was payback for what he did before. And if he was able to come after me again, I should have no complaints. And yet we could still be friends in other circumstances even if we were merciless competitors on the chessboard. The point being was, in that game, when I realized I was winning I asked him if he had made a mistake on purpose, and he said no. The fact I knew I wasn't that good indicated to me that I suspected he was letting me win. I believed him when he said he was not; this sort of thing makes it clear, at least to me, that believing that the game of chess is solved or is close to being solved ignores the fact it is easy for people to make a mistake serious enough to lose the game while not meaning to. |
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Here's an online chess tournament I'm in. by 12/03/2015, 3:30pm PST  Unfortunately, chess is a "solved game." by 12/03/2015, 4:16pm PST Chess is not solved. Like you said, that has a specific meaning by 12/03/2015, 9:47pm PST Are you out of your mind, or just more brain damaged than me? by 12/04/2015, 3:26pm PST Re: Are you out of your mind, or just more brain damaged than me? by 12/04/2015, 3:47pm PST I LOST AGAIN?! TIME TO FUCK SHIT UP NT by 12/04/2015, 4:05pm PST Jesus fucking Christ, TDARCOS really did read the goddamn Wikipedia chess articl NT by 12/04/2015, 11:09pm PST The fact that a computer is making a move is immaterial by 12/05/2015, 1:07am PST |
